Well, I dunno about you but I use one main PC at home, one Mac laptop, and one PC at work, and I have setup all three with a toolbar bookmark that goes to the secure Gmail session. https://mail.google.com/
That makes it easy to connect the right way. It doesn't take long to type by hand either.
My SL character was the polar opposite of me, outgoing, friendly, attractive (face it, in RL I am the stereotypical/. user). And yes, my SL me was a she. Go figure. What other woman listens to me? None.
Anyway, what I did was pretty standard stuff compared to what your friend got from it but it was still pretty awesome for me there for a while.
I say 'was' because I closed my SL account two months ago. Got tired of paying for it when all these corporate giants were coming in with big budgets and bigger marketing plans. Linden of course caters to those big spenders and the land barons. Regular users like me didn't matter and if it's hard to stomach paying for something where, no matter what, you don't matter.
Plus I also sympathize with the marketers upset about the griefers. Linden does nothing to stop this crap. They don't give a damn. Well, marketers DO care and they're not going to tolerate the BS.
Here's some hilarity. My workplace has wifi but they decided it was a security risk and disabled the connection. All you could do with it was print to one printer and surf the outside internet. It had no access to network shares.
But the odd client or employee from another branch still needs network access, so they wired up one of the conference rooms with a switch and ethernet cables, all of which tie right into our lan.
Apparently it's totally OK if unknown laptops make an unauthenticated physical connection to the network, where they can do a lot more damage faster and access network shares and things, but it is NOT OK if they just connect to the wireless to surf.
Since the product is not OUT yet and hasn't been impartially reviewed -to my knowledge- and tested in real-world use, all we have to go on is the check list of features. That's all we have.
Apple's coyness about facts is really leaving us no choice.
Though I have not yet looked at TFA, I have to give him some slack on X11 issues.
I've had a MacbookPro since last November and *I* was totally unable to get X11 to install on it. The installer insists that a newer version of X11 is already installed (it's not) and won't allow me to reinstall, and apps that need X11 insist that it's not installed, which is correct.
Did I try _____? Yeah. Everything from online help and forums to a total format and reinstall of OSX. Nothing worked.
No X11 meant I was unable to use OpenOffice.org which requires X11. Bummer. So I got Neo Office instead and that works fine. Never found any other solution to this problem.
The whole X11 thing hit me hard and fast right after getting the MBP and would have soured me on the Mac as a whole, but I don't depend on an office suite for my day-to-day Mac usage so it was simply a PIA rather than a deal breaker.
Here we are some seven months later and the X11 thing remains my worst experience so far on OSX.
OK, I guess the fact that the MBP gets hotter than boiling water now and then is another problem. I don't think a notebook that can reach 204C is, well, designed right. It survived that but damn. It can't be good for it. Even if they're pushing the cutting edge, there should be something in the OS or hardware to throttle down when it goes into thermal runaway.
As long as it has a modern-day equivalent of Erin Gray an' her nifty tight I mean white uniform. *sigh*
They can keep the Starfighter model too. That was nice.
But god help us if they remake that "Galaxy Broadcast" epsiode. That music still gives me shivers.
I am wishy-washy on bringing back Twiki. Mel Blanc made that guy work but he's dead.
The second season stuff, ugh. What worries me is that they thought season 2 was an improvement. What evil could they do with a whole new remake? Yikes.
Props to South Park for their nifty Buck Rogers parody.
Well, if you ARE with your ride, they can still get it by threat of violence (good old carjacking) or simply by politely asking for the keys, a technique which apparently works well for some of you recovery agents.
If someone wants to steal or recover a given car, the only question is how much effort they're willing to put into the goal and how badly they want it.
Every WD drive I've owned -which is around 10- has failed. Every damn one of them, and their under warranty replacements too.
I've lost drives from other brands too, sure. But only WD has a 100% failure rate.
Why did I keep using them? The first one I thought was fluke. Then it's warranty replacement died too.
Won another WD in a contest. It died. When that replacement came, I gave it to someone else. Never even opened it. It died too and victimized the lucky new owner.
Then I went some years before getting in a bunch of WD 80gig "special edition" drives. At the time, they were the only ones offering 3ry warranties on retail drives. Not trusting WD, each of those drives was set as Raid 0 with another identical WD. Every system got a pair. They started blowing up at the 2yr mark, one after another. It was hilarious. Worst Spinrite readings I've ever seen.
All the while this was going on, I have had Maxtor and Seagate drives in the same computers in the same temp. environments and none of them have failed. Knock on wood.
Odds are, someday I will lose a Seagate/Maxtor because that's all I use now. One of these guys will eventually die. But my experience with WD taught me all about the need for backups and redundancy and those are things I now use with every drive brand. Assume they will die on you and back the hell up. This has saved my bacon many times, so I really owe WD a debt of thanks for teaching me not to trust hard drives. Ever.
Price isn't everything. There are plenty of people who LIKE paying more for a better brand name. They go for the HP "Pavilion" (and say Pavilion like it means something, even though it doesn't really) every time because they can say to their neighbors "I got an HP Pavilion" and literally beam with pride about it. "I paid extra because I could." (nevermind that they're cashing in home equity to pay off these bills, but I digress....)
For the same reason, they buy an expensive car and park it outside so the whole neighborhood can see it and know the awesomeness of their wallets. Being able to brag that you spent more means something to a lot of people. They have no other way to show off.
Here's a case in point. I got a sweet deal on a refurbed Apple notebook last fall. Roughly $900 off new price. Apple's refurbs come with full warranty and everything so it's exactly like buying new but cheaper. It is pretty much the best way to get a discount on Apple hardware.
So my coworker covets my new notebook and decides to buy one. Luck! The Apple refurb store has good ones in stock, for even less than I paid. What did he do? He bought new and paid more $$ because he couldn't bear the idea of paying less for Apple. It seemed wrong to him to get a deal.
Worse, because I got a deal and paid less, he thinks I'm not really an Apple customer/user. In his mind, paying a lot to get in is simply the cost of joining the Apple Union, so to speak. If you didn't pay your dues, you don't really count.
So. Put your $900 Windows laptop next to an $800 Linx laptop, identical guts, looks, everything. Most people are still going to get the $900 one. Because it signifies that they could spend more. Because perhaps they are familiar with Windows. Because when it doesn't work, they can call any number of friends or neighbors or somebody to help. Yes, you can do that with linux too but it's not as easy to find that help for most people.
Also, the $900 comes with a better commission check for the computer sales guy so which one is he going to push?
As for iPod, I didn't get one of those until I had already owned four other MP3 players. I know bullshit players real well. The iPod wins in things like on the go playlists, play a track in iTunes & jump to the iPod and it knows where you were in the track and picks right up, fast syncing, easy podcasts via (the piece of crap) iTunes. Plus you can get iPod accessories everywhere. The blanking corner gas station has iPod chargers and cables.
Suppose I could sing worth a damn and decided one day that I wanted my very own streaming internet station, featuring my songs. Just mine, with me singing and perhaps performing some instrument.
No RIAA involvement, nor SESAC or JASRAC or ASCAP or BMI.
Suppose somebody actually wanted to listen to this stream from hell -heck, say that person was me wanting to hear my own voice. (insanity, but go with it)
According to SoundXchange, I'd have to send them money, then join their group (pay more money) to ask them to send me my money back.
What the hell?
They don't own any right to my singing nor any right to represent me or collect fees or royalties.
If cellphones were really really dangerous, we'd have aircraft graveyards everywhere, especially around airports.
What do cellphones talk to? Cell towers. Where are those towers? EVERYWHERE, and they all operate at much higher power levels than any handset.
If there was some sort of danger, cell tower signals from the ground -particularly towers near airports where they are always A LOT of such towers- would be knocking planes out of the sky on an hourly basis from miles away. Every airliner in the sky flies over hundreds of these towers on every flight. It would be like the worst anti-aircraft fire ever devised.
But it doesn't happen.
And cell towers are hardly the most powerful transmitters in the wild. A cell tower throws out a couple watts. A TV transmitter can throw out a million watts and there are thousands of those towers too.
Aircraft operate happily amid a sea of RF and generally nothing goes wrong. So the idea that a wimpy little cell handset are threats are just overblown assumptions, unproven and unrealistic.
It's not just piracy they are worried about. It's also extreme porn and adult anime. The really nasty stuff some take for granted over here is against the law in the UK and they actually do check for it in the mails and have confiscated discs and charged the intended recipients with obscenity crimes.
They also go after anime which defames the church, especially if it's some sort of porn anime with religious overtones. They don't play games with that stuff. It'll get you busted like kiddy porn over here except they're even more paranoid about it.
Just be glad for the choice: I have to drive over an hour to reach that same mall, and it's a trip I make now and then just to hit the Frys.
The other stores, feh. I have a Staples and Circuit City nearby. There are only a handful of Office Max stores left in the area, none close. No nearby Office Depots or Best Buys.
They are building a new shopping area near me which would have been perfect for a CompUSA but I guess that's not happening.
Apple is entering a different marketplace where there are established competitors used to bringing radical products to market quickly. They have to: a new phone model might only get six months to succeed wildly or be declared a flop.*
Since Apple has released info on this one six whole months before launch date, I would expect the other phone manus -already used to ripping each other off for ideas- to bring out multiple different models inspired by Apple, and do it all before Apple sells their first phone. Not only will they beat Apple to market, they'll do it for less money.
So no iTunes? No. But there is a significant market segment that doesn't want or actually need a music playing phone or the mobile OS X. What's left is the physical design and that's going to be easy for other manus to steal and copy and use.
*and by the way, a successful phone model has at most an 18-month run. In 18 months, the hit Razr went from $500 Academy Award prize bag gift to the phone counter at Walmart where anyone can get one for 20 bucks. Apple cannot expect to command full price for this phone for more than a few months. There are simply too many entrenched competitors used to fighting it out with new model after new model. Apple's spent two years making ONE model, with rumors of maybe another one coming. To compete, the should have five or six in the pipeline for the next 12-18 months, and a ramp up after that where they will push out a new one roughly every month.
Does Apple have that much phone skillz? Are there that many tricks up Jobs sleeves? Can they innovate over and over again?
What are these "women" creatures and where do they live?
Please post pictures, thanks.
Re:Cell providers are the problem, not the phone
on
Inside Apple's iPhone
·
· Score: 1
I have to take an opposite view: I want a phone I can touch-dial without looking at it, and without trying to sort out which touch mode it's in. This is one of the few things my Samsung A680 phone does right.
Many people use their phones while driving, because we all know how hard it is to hold that conversation until later. If given touch-screens, you can bet drivers will happily take their eyes off the road to dial, with predicable traffic results.
By the time it's released, the 2006 game will be a full year behind the calendar.
Compare with Madden and other sports games which tend to release games ahead of the athletic season they're named for, or at least manage to hit the same year.
F12006 is also going to be behind the times given the amount of team changes that have happened since the 2006 season ended. Unless they plan to update it (and if they did, they'd surely change the name), the game rosters will look almost nothing like the upcoming 2007 season. And so it will be a late game and also hopelessly out of date.
I don't think it matters too much, however, because F1 console games have a pretty bad history anyways. The game doesn't have to try hard. The last good one I played was Psygnosis' F1 Challenge on the PS1, circa 1999 or 2000. I got the XBox F1 game, played it, and sent it running straight back to the game store. Awful game.
Another reason the delay doesn't matter is that Americans will skip buying it no matter what, and the rest of the world will buy it anyway just because it's an F1 game. Even late, it's got guaranteed sales. And Bernie already got his fee out of it.
Concrete is not really THAT different from technology we knew they had: plastering.
The pyramids were originally covered in a limestone plaster veneer which would have given them smooth sides rather than the jaggies we know today. It can still be seen on small areas on some pyramids but most of that smooth plaster layer has been eroded over time by the sand and wind and rain. Or low-res game graphics. Take your pick.
The point is that the plaster was installed using the exact same set of ingredients, tools and technologies that could also have been used to produce the concrete. If they knew how to do one, they might know how to do the other.
Modern analogy: we know how to build Intel PCs. Using many of the same parts, you can build an AMD PC. That's sort of the difference between plaster and concrete. Kinda.
Either way, there's not a quantum jump from one to the other.
Kudos to the builders for coming up with a concrete mix that has managed to fool scientists for hundreds of years. To some future civilization, our modern freeway interchanges will look like water-eroded structures or something created by aliens.
Many of us have drivers licenses, but how many of us still drive badly, break assorted traffic laws on a routine basis, and generally get away with it? I know I do.
There are already assorted "anti-hacking" laws and even sections of SL's user agreement that prohibit this sort of thing but still it happens. It would still happen as long as the perpetrators felt they could either get away with it or at least have enough fun out of it to make it worth whatever consequences might happen.
Now that SL money is freely convertable to and from real money, there is also a financial incentive to get in SL and disrupt commerce. Giving businesses a headache IS missing enough for some people.
I just got my Macbook Pro this week. And now I wonder what the hell made me wait so long. It's really quite impressive.
My friends are taking bets on whether I end up the evangelical mac convert who can't ever shut up about it, or whether I end up the smug mac user who just grumbles and smirks.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, my main PC has three fans devoted just to keeping my drives cooled.
My Tivo has long had the lid off and there's a special fan clamped next to it dedicated just to cooling the drive.
That's four fans worth of noise just for drive cooling, far and away MUCH louder than any other noise in this room.
If there's a way to keep them cold and quiet, I am in.
Well, I dunno about you but I use one main PC at home, one Mac laptop, and one PC at work, and I have setup all three with a toolbar bookmark that goes to the secure Gmail session. https://mail.google.com/
That makes it easy to connect the right way. It doesn't take long to type by hand either.
My SL character was the polar opposite of me, outgoing, friendly, attractive (face it, in RL I am the stereotypical /. user). And yes, my SL me was a she. Go figure. What other woman listens to me? None.
Anyway, what I did was pretty standard stuff compared to what your friend got from it but it was still pretty awesome for me there for a while.
I say 'was' because I closed my SL account two months ago. Got tired of paying for it when all these corporate giants were coming in with big budgets and bigger marketing plans. Linden of course caters to those big spenders and the land barons. Regular users like me didn't matter and if it's hard to stomach paying for something where, no matter what, you don't matter.
Plus I also sympathize with the marketers upset about the griefers. Linden does nothing to stop this crap. They don't give a damn. Well, marketers DO care and they're not going to tolerate the BS.
Here's some hilarity. My workplace has wifi but they decided it was a security risk and disabled the connection. All you could do with it was print to one printer and surf the outside internet. It had no access to network shares.
But the odd client or employee from another branch still needs network access, so they wired up one of the conference rooms with a switch and ethernet cables, all of which tie right into our lan.
Apparently it's totally OK if unknown laptops make an unauthenticated physical connection to the network, where they can do a lot more damage faster and access network shares and things, but it is NOT OK if they just connect to the wireless to surf.
Since the product is not OUT yet and hasn't been impartially reviewed -to my knowledge- and tested in real-world use, all we have to go on is the check list of features. That's all we have.
Apple's coyness about facts is really leaving us no choice.
Though I have not yet looked at TFA, I have to give him some slack on X11 issues.
I've had a MacbookPro since last November and *I* was totally unable to get X11 to install on it. The installer insists that a newer version of X11 is already installed (it's not) and won't allow me to reinstall, and apps that need X11 insist that it's not installed, which is correct.
Did I try _____? Yeah. Everything from online help and forums to a total format and reinstall of OSX. Nothing worked.
No X11 meant I was unable to use OpenOffice.org which requires X11. Bummer. So I got Neo Office instead and that works fine. Never found any other solution to this problem.
The whole X11 thing hit me hard and fast right after getting the MBP and would have soured me on the Mac as a whole, but I don't depend on an office suite for my day-to-day Mac usage so it was simply a PIA rather than a deal breaker.
Here we are some seven months later and the X11 thing remains my worst experience so far on OSX.
OK, I guess the fact that the MBP gets hotter than boiling water now and then is another problem. I don't think a notebook that can reach 204C is, well, designed right. It survived that but damn. It can't be good for it. Even if they're pushing the cutting edge, there should be something in the OS or hardware to throttle down when it goes into thermal runaway.
As long as it has a modern-day equivalent of Erin Gray an' her nifty tight I mean white uniform. *sigh*
They can keep the Starfighter model too. That was nice.
But god help us if they remake that "Galaxy Broadcast" epsiode. That music still gives me shivers.
I am wishy-washy on bringing back Twiki. Mel Blanc made that guy work but he's dead.
The second season stuff, ugh. What worries me is that they thought season 2 was an improvement. What evil could they do with a whole new remake? Yikes.
Props to South Park for their nifty Buck Rogers parody.
Well, if you ARE with your ride, they can still get it by threat of violence (good old carjacking) or simply by politely asking for the keys, a technique which apparently works well for some of you recovery agents.
If someone wants to steal or recover a given car, the only question is how much effort they're willing to put into the goal and how badly they want it.
Every WD drive I've owned -which is around 10- has failed. Every damn one of them, and their under warranty replacements too.
I've lost drives from other brands too, sure. But only WD has a 100% failure rate.
Why did I keep using them? The first one I thought was fluke. Then it's warranty replacement died too.
Won another WD in a contest. It died. When that replacement came, I gave it to someone else. Never even opened it. It died too and victimized the lucky new owner.
Then I went some years before getting in a bunch of WD 80gig "special edition" drives. At the time, they were the only ones offering 3ry warranties on retail drives. Not trusting WD, each of those drives was set as Raid 0 with another identical WD. Every system got a pair. They started blowing up at the 2yr mark, one after another. It was hilarious. Worst Spinrite readings I've ever seen.
All the while this was going on, I have had Maxtor and Seagate drives in the same computers in the same temp. environments and none of them have failed. Knock on wood.
Odds are, someday I will lose a Seagate/Maxtor because that's all I use now. One of these guys will eventually die. But my experience with WD taught me all about the need for backups and redundancy and those are things I now use with every drive brand. Assume they will die on you and back the hell up. This has saved my bacon many times, so I really owe WD a debt of thanks for teaching me not to trust hard drives. Ever.
Price isn't everything. There are plenty of people who LIKE paying more for a better brand name. They go for the HP "Pavilion" (and say Pavilion like it means something, even though it doesn't really) every time because they can say to their neighbors "I got an HP Pavilion" and literally beam with pride about it. "I paid extra because I could." (nevermind that they're cashing in home equity to pay off these bills, but I digress....)
For the same reason, they buy an expensive car and park it outside so the whole neighborhood can see it and know the awesomeness of their wallets. Being able to brag that you spent more means something to a lot of people. They have no other way to show off.
Here's a case in point. I got a sweet deal on a refurbed Apple notebook last fall. Roughly $900 off new price. Apple's refurbs come with full warranty and everything so it's exactly like buying new but cheaper. It is pretty much the best way to get a discount on Apple hardware.
So my coworker covets my new notebook and decides to buy one. Luck! The Apple refurb store has good ones in stock, for even less than I paid. What did he do? He bought new and paid more $$ because he couldn't bear the idea of paying less for Apple. It seemed wrong to him to get a deal.
Worse, because I got a deal and paid less, he thinks I'm not really an Apple customer/user. In his mind, paying a lot to get in is simply the cost of joining the Apple Union, so to speak. If you didn't pay your dues, you don't really count.
So. Put your $900 Windows laptop next to an $800 Linx laptop, identical guts, looks, everything. Most people are still going to get the $900 one. Because it signifies that they could spend more. Because perhaps they are familiar with Windows. Because when it doesn't work, they can call any number of friends or neighbors or somebody to help. Yes, you can do that with linux too but it's not as easy to find that help for most people.
Also, the $900 comes with a better commission check for the computer sales guy so which one is he going to push?
As for iPod, I didn't get one of those until I had already owned four other MP3 players. I know bullshit players real well. The iPod wins in things like on the go playlists, play a track in iTunes & jump to the iPod and it knows where you were in the track and picks right up, fast syncing, easy podcasts via (the piece of crap) iTunes. Plus you can get iPod accessories everywhere. The blanking corner gas station has iPod chargers and cables.
Suppose I could sing worth a damn and decided one day that I wanted my very own streaming internet station, featuring my songs. Just mine, with me singing and perhaps performing some instrument.
No RIAA involvement, nor SESAC or JASRAC or ASCAP or BMI.
Suppose somebody actually wanted to listen to this stream from hell -heck, say that person was me wanting to hear my own voice. (insanity, but go with it)
According to SoundXchange, I'd have to send them money, then join their group (pay more money) to ask them to send me my money back.
What the hell?
They don't own any right to my singing nor any right to represent me or collect fees or royalties.
Aw man, that's a tough one.
Lesseee.... I don't play with linux enough to worry about the kernel, so it would be much more useful to know what women were thinking.
Provided of course that such knowledge didn't drive me insane.
If cellphones were really really dangerous, we'd have aircraft graveyards everywhere, especially around airports.
What do cellphones talk to? Cell towers. Where are those towers? EVERYWHERE, and they all operate at much higher power levels than any handset.
If there was some sort of danger, cell tower signals from the ground -particularly towers near airports where they are always A LOT of such towers- would be knocking planes out of the sky on an hourly basis from miles away. Every airliner in the sky flies over hundreds of these towers on every flight. It would be like the worst anti-aircraft fire ever devised.
But it doesn't happen.
And cell towers are hardly the most powerful transmitters in the wild. A cell tower throws out a couple watts. A TV transmitter can throw out a million watts and there are thousands of those towers too.
Aircraft operate happily amid a sea of RF and generally nothing goes wrong. So the idea that a wimpy little cell handset are threats are just overblown assumptions, unproven and unrealistic.
Wow! CERN really DID invent a time machine as predicted, because this fake story from tomorrow got posted a day early.
How can you be so certain the interface is "better" than Tivo?
For one, few people have actually gotten their hands on an Apple TV so it's hard for me to believe you have one and have formed an opinion so quickly.
For another thing, it's going to be subjective. Some people will always prefer Tivo over whatever is used on this Apple box, and vice versa.
And another thing, the two devices are designed to do two entirely different things so comparing them is a little silly.
I am sure my can opener interface is better than my floor sweeper... but they're not made to do the same thing, so it doesn't matter.
It's not just piracy they are worried about. It's also extreme porn and adult anime. The really nasty stuff some take for granted over here is against the law in the UK and they actually do check for it in the mails and have confiscated discs and charged the intended recipients with obscenity crimes.
They also go after anime which defames the church, especially if it's some sort of porn anime with religious overtones. They don't play games with that stuff. It'll get you busted like kiddy porn over here except they're even more paranoid about it.
"No sex, please. We're British." indeed.
Just be glad for the choice: I have to drive over an hour to reach that same mall, and it's a trip I make now and then just to hit the Frys.
The other stores, feh. I have a Staples and Circuit City nearby. There are only a handful of Office Max stores left in the area, none close. No nearby Office Depots or Best Buys.
They are building a new shopping area near me which would have been perfect for a CompUSA but I guess that's not happening.
Apple is entering a different marketplace where there are established competitors used to bringing radical products to market quickly. They have to: a new phone model might only get six months to succeed wildly or be declared a flop.*
Since Apple has released info on this one six whole months before launch date, I would expect the other phone manus -already used to ripping each other off for ideas- to bring out multiple different models inspired by Apple, and do it all before Apple sells their first phone. Not only will they beat Apple to market, they'll do it for less money.
So no iTunes? No. But there is a significant market segment that doesn't want or actually need a music playing phone or the mobile OS X. What's left is the physical design and that's going to be easy for other manus to steal and copy and use.
*and by the way, a successful phone model has at most an 18-month run. In 18 months, the hit Razr went from $500 Academy Award prize bag gift to the phone counter at Walmart where anyone can get one for 20 bucks. Apple cannot expect to command full price for this phone for more than a few months. There are simply too many entrenched competitors used to fighting it out with new model after new model. Apple's spent two years making ONE model, with rumors of maybe another one coming. To compete, the should have five or six in the pipeline for the next 12-18 months, and a ramp up after that where they will push out a new one roughly every month.
Does Apple have that much phone skillz? Are there that many tricks up Jobs sleeves? Can they innovate over and over again?
What are these "women" creatures and where do they live?
Please post pictures, thanks.
I have to take an opposite view: I want a phone I can touch-dial without looking at it, and without trying to sort out which touch mode it's in. This is one of the few things my Samsung A680 phone does right.
Many people use their phones while driving, because we all know how hard it is to hold that conversation until later. If given touch-screens, you can bet drivers will happily take their eyes off the road to dial, with predicable traffic results.
The Darwin awards will be happy.
By the time it's released, the 2006 game will be a full year behind the calendar.
Compare with Madden and other sports games which tend to release games ahead of the athletic season they're named for, or at least manage to hit the same year.
F12006 is also going to be behind the times given the amount of team changes that have happened since the 2006 season ended. Unless they plan to update it (and if they did, they'd surely change the name), the game rosters will look almost nothing like the upcoming 2007 season. And so it will be a late game and also hopelessly out of date.
I don't think it matters too much, however, because F1 console games have a pretty bad history anyways. The game doesn't have to try hard. The last good one I played was Psygnosis' F1 Challenge on the PS1, circa 1999 or 2000. I got the XBox F1 game, played it, and sent it running straight back to the game store. Awful game.
Another reason the delay doesn't matter is that Americans will skip buying it no matter what, and the rest of the world will buy it anyway just because it's an F1 game. Even late, it's got guaranteed sales. And Bernie already got his fee out of it.
Concrete is not really THAT different from technology we knew they had: plastering.
The pyramids were originally covered in a limestone plaster veneer which would have given them smooth sides rather than the jaggies we know today. It can still be seen on small areas on some pyramids but most of that smooth plaster layer has been eroded over time by the sand and wind and rain. Or low-res game graphics. Take your pick.
The point is that the plaster was installed using the exact same set of ingredients, tools and technologies that could also have been used to produce the concrete. If they knew how to do one, they might know how to do the other.
Modern analogy: we know how to build Intel PCs. Using many of the same parts, you can build an AMD PC. That's sort of the difference between plaster and concrete. Kinda.
Either way, there's not a quantum jump from one to the other.
Kudos to the builders for coming up with a concrete mix that has managed to fool scientists for hundreds of years. To some future civilization, our modern freeway interchanges will look like water-eroded structures or something created by aliens.
Many of us have drivers licenses, but how many of us still drive badly, break assorted traffic laws on a routine basis, and generally get away with it? I know I do.
There are already assorted "anti-hacking" laws and even sections of SL's user agreement that prohibit this sort of thing but still it happens. It would still happen as long as the perpetrators felt they could either get away with it or at least have enough fun out of it to make it worth whatever consequences might happen.
Now that SL money is freely convertable to and from real money, there is also a financial incentive to get in SL and disrupt commerce. Giving businesses a headache IS missing enough for some people.
But what will we do about the flood of MCA cards?
It's the end of the world!!!
I just got my Macbook Pro this week. And now I wonder what the hell made me wait so long. It's really quite impressive.
My friends are taking bets on whether I end up the evangelical mac convert who can't ever shut up about it, or whether I end up the smug mac user who just grumbles and smirks.